


A Series of Questionable Choices

by Cards_Slash



Series: Second Verse [5]
Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Lovers, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:07:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23014474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: A witch is caught, a secret is told and Doc and Bobo almost have a real conversation.
Relationships: Doc Holliday/Bobo Del Rey | Robert Svane
Series: Second Verse [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1632727
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19





	A Series of Questionable Choices

Constance had made a hobby of the law a few decades ago. A man could be forgiven for failing to check the validity of her license to practice but anyone willing to believe that _Connie_ was a young profession needed to have his eyesight checked. She hadn’t looked the same since she turned eighty and the years were being less and less kind to her as they dragged on. Maybe it was just Bobo seeing what he wanted, but it seemed like this latest season of struggle had really started putting fresh depths of foundation on her face to hide her extraordinary age. Men didn’t care to look at the details like that and Constance knew that. Her face could be a horse’s ass as long as her body kept it’s curves. 

But Constance wasn’t _here_. She hadn’t been for _days_ and the sheer number of missed appointments and unanswered calls seemed to suggest that she had not intention of returning. That gamble she’d made at the homestead was the beginning of the end; the finale that they’d been working their way around to for years.

“What are we looking for, boss?” Peeper asked. He was ripping files out of the cabinets, flipping open the folders without bothering to think critically about what he was seeing. 

Bobo was looking at her desk, at how perfectly she’d arranged it. A dish of paperclips, a pink stapler, a photo on the corner of her desk showing the smiling face of someone’s children. He’d never been in the room to hear her making up stories about her boys, but he bet she could turn on the waterworks when she needed them. “We’re looking for the witch,” Bobo said, “so anything that tells us where she went.”

The man he left at the door rapped his knuckles against the frame, he was tipped sideways without looking over his shoulder. “You’ve got a visitor, boss.”

Well _finally_. Bobo snapped his fingers and the revenants making a mess of Constance’s perfectly arranged office dropped everything in an instant. Even Peeper who sometimes had to be told twice was already headed for the door when Henry tipped his hat at the guard at the door for letting him in. 

That smell of old blood hadn’t washed off his skin (and how could it, overnight?) but he wasn’t _exhausted_ to the same degree. No, he was almost well rested, standing across the room with his hands over his guns. “I was summoned,” he said.

The door couldn’t close properly with how it had been broken open, but the last revenant through it tried his best to fit it back in the frame. Henry looked _amused_ still, like it was funny how delicately the wood was being jostled to fit inside the busted frame. 

“Here,” Bobo said. He threw the phone at Henry who caught it in the cradle of two hands like it was something precious. “It seems Constance has gone into hiding. I can’t help but think that’s because _someone_ shot her.”

“In my defense, she was attacking me.”

The last thing Henry needed was a defense. Men that weren’t sorry for the things they did weren’t very good at apologizing for them. Bobo waved his hand to clear the air of yesterday’s worries. “Luckily,” he said, “I have what she wants. Now, me and my boys can _catch_ the witch and you and I can…”

Henry stopped looking at the phone long enough to look at him. “Kill?” he prompted.

“ _Eventually_ ,” Bobo agreed. He had come around the oversized desk while Henry had been watching him. That same quirked smile and half-lifted eyebrow look on his face like things were finally starting to go his way. The closer Bobo got, the more settled that stare got. Henry couldn’t even have known how his stance shifted, how his arms loosened at his sides, how his whole body seemed to prepare to be grabbed. 

“We really must have a thorough discussion about the nature of these visits,” Henry said, “at least some kind of _code_ to indicate when I should expect to be…”

“Fucked?” That was the simplest word for the complicated situation they found themselves in. It summed up the total of their activities to date; the total of expectation that made sense. It even fit with how Henry let himself be pulled forward a step to fit up against Bobo’s body. He was lax-limbed and easy to kiss because he was just _letting_ it happen. 

“In a manner of speaking,” Henry said when the kiss broke between them. For all the indifference in that kiss, he made no attempt to wriggle free. No, he snaked his arm under Bobo’s coat and around his back like he was going to hang on for the ride. “What _exactly_ am I meant to do with this.” He held the phone up between them.

“Answer it.” Bobo slapped his ass and it made him jump. “Now get out of here. Go _back_ to the homestead. I’ll call you when we’ve got the witch.”

“I do not need to be confined to…”

“Just,” Bobo said as he pulled away from him. “ _Stay_ on the homestead. We kill the witch, you can do whatever you want. I _can’t_ track the witch and…” And what? And _keep you safe_. “Deal with you at the same time.”

Henry’s smile was turned upside down. His hand was clenched around the phone but he rolled his eyes, “ _fine_.”

\--

Doc was struck, and not for the first time in the past seventy-two hours, by what an utter bastard Xavier Dolls could be. It was one thing to betray a man, and insult his honor, and slap him across the face and it was _another_ thing to leave a woman defenseless and scared for no damn good reason. While Doc was of the opinion that Wynonna was very capable of protecting herself, sometimes it was not a matter of being _capable_ of mounting your own defense it was about the desire to be protected. 

Dolls had proven twice, in very quick succession, to be a slimy piece of government shit when he should have been a good friend.

“I don’t need a knight in shining armor,” Wynonna said. She was holding her glass of whiskey with no real intent to drink it. Conversations such as these often times required something to hold in your hands, some sort of prop to vent your nerves on. 

Doc, himself, was very partial to shooting things when the need for conversations like this arose. “Well that is good, as I believe Dolls has long since abandoned that white horse.” While _she_ might not be in the mood to imbibe, he had never met a glass of whiskey that he did not want to drink. “He is a hypocrite at best and a malicious manufacture of lies at worst.”

Wynonna was leaning against the wall, watching him with more worry than she’d ever managed before. He recognized that darkness filling her up from the inside out; he’d known it as soon as he’d seen her holding Peacemaker in her lap by the still-warm bit of earth where Jack had sunk back into hell. She was an open wound, trying to figure out if she was looking to hurt someone else or heal herself. Doc had done both at one time or another and neither had left him fully satisfied. “I almost killed a guy today,” sounded like a confession she didn’t want to make.

That was a whole conversation that they shouldn’t be having. Wynonna was _angry_ and she was _hurt_ and killing someone over that feeling was hardly the least understandable reaction to have. (At least not as far as Doc was concerned. And that was why it should not be him _here_ now.)

“A case of mistaken identity,” Doc said.

“No, I…” She looked down at the whiskey still filling up her glass. She spun it, watching how it licked up along the sides and then just slapped it on the table at her side. “What about you?”

“Me? Well, I believe the history books have been very _kind_ about the number of men they think I killed.”

“No, I mean,” Wynonna took a step forward, and stopped like she still hadn’t worked out how she wanted to feel about _this_. It really was expecting too much to think Dolls might have kept his brand new secrets to himself. “You said Dolls was a malicious manufacturer of lies… Does that mean…”

“Wynonna, darling, you’re going to have to finish a question if you expect me to be able to answer it.” And he needed to finish off this last bit of whiskey in his glass. He’d put the bottle down and wished now that he hadn’t.

There was an arm’s length of space between them now. Wynonna was looking at his throat and not his face, thinking over all the facts how she knew them. Her fingers were hesitant, soft like flower petals, folding back the collar of his shirt to see how far those bruises on his neck went. She looked him in the eyes (and he really wished she hadn’t) when she said, “Dolls said that… That you were _prostituting_ yourself.”

That was most certainly not how Dolls had said it. Doc folded his hand over hers and lifted it away from his clothes. It felt just enough like betrayal to stand so close to her. He felt just enough like a liar by drawing out the moment without answering it. 

Just, whatever he said now, it was going to make a damn fine mess of everything that came after.

“I don’t care,” Wynonna said in a rush. “I mean, it doesn’t matter if you did...or _do_.”

She kissed him like he _understood_ and the hell of it was that he _did_. He was holding one of her hands but the other was spread across his face. Her thumb was smoothing along his cheek so softly it _hurt_ to press the heel of his hand against her shoulder and push her back a step. It was worse than the beatings he’d already taken, watching her insecurity and worry and _hurt_. 

“We _can’t_ ,” he said.

“Right,” she nodded, “right. I don’t--I was--I didn’t mean to--”

Every half sentence as an attempt to find an apology that would address the harm she thought she’d caused. It was her guilt over misconceptions and missteps. He could have let her stand there working out what she’d done wrong and it would have been _safer_ but there were some lines even he wasn’t capable of crossing. 

“Wynonna,” he said. There wasn’t enough air in the world to fill his lungs up full enough to get the next words out without a tremble. “I’m not a whore. I’m _the_ whore, _Bobo’s_ whore.”

Just then, Wynonna was rethinking her choice not to drink the whiskey she’d carried through the house. She took another step back, because you needed space to shoot a man, and shook her head. “Bobo’s whore,” sounded _ridiculous_ but she wasn’t laughing, “what--like--he pays better than anyone else? Like he’s got a monopoly on your ass? Do _I_ need to write him a check? Like--what does that _mean_?”

“Wynonna,” he said very calmly.

This had never been a calm conversation. A smart man didn’t go springing news like this on anyone but sure as hell not on someone as angry as Wynonna was. She pulled Peacemaker in one long motion, with absolutely no mercy on her face. “Don’t say my name like that. That’s a friendship perk. I’m not friends with my enemy’s whore, so...why don’t you tell me what exactly you mean by _Bobo’s whore_.”

Doc was not the sort of man that liked putting his hands up in surrender, but his odds of survival increased by making himself less of a threat. While he was showing his hands, there was a chance she might be _listening_. “As you know, my primary concern since I found myself freed from the well is finding and _killing_ the witch.”

“Skip the history lesson, get to the part where you’re fucking Bobo on the reg.”

“Bobo offered the witch’s name for…” whatever he wanted, exactly how he wanted it (if memory served), “the opportunity to fuck me.”

“Because you’ve got such a sweet ass?” Wynonna asked. She had taken a step to the side, closer to the whiskey she’d set down. 

Doc moved with her, keeping his hands where she could see them. If he could have thought of anything that wasn’t the very strong desire not to be shot (again), the coldness of her voice might have _hurt_ worse than he expected. “Because I am...because I _was_ Wyatt’s friend, I assume. Most revenants seem to take exception to that particular fact and I believe Bobo found it _extremely_ petty and pleasing to make such an offer.”

Wynonna’s rage wasn’t less, but it flinched anyway. “And you just took him up on it? There’s other ways to get information nowadays, Doc. Google? Bing?”

“It was expedient.”

She snorted at that, “and?”

And? That was enough of a reason to call a man a whore. Doc dropped his hands, “just put that down.”

Wynonna was _not_ going to lower the weapon, but she took a step forward, “why? Does it make you uncomfortable, Doc? Like, maybe you shouldn’t have trusted me? Like maybe I’m not the person that you thought I was? _Sit down_.”

Doc sat and Wynonna eased into the chair opposite him. She pulled the whiskey bottle he’d left on the table between the chairs over toward her. The cap was still loosely balanced on the top and she spun it off with her thumb. He could have shot her in the time it took her to swallow a mouthful and relax back into the chair. 

Hell, he could have shot that gun out of her hand a dozen times since they’d started. “It wasn’t supposed to be anything, Wynonna. Hell, I’ve sex with worse men for less. You don’t know half the things I’ve done.” 

“Apparently not.” She was resting her arm on her crossed legs, keeping Peacemaker pointed at him across the arm of the chair. “It feels like when a man sends you a box of tongues, it starts to mean something. What happened? Was it just so _good_ you had to go back?”

No. No, it was a slobbering dog of a man in the dark, looking at him like he was there for the taking. It was the memory of that knife on his neck, and the very, _very_ real idea that he was outnumbered. It might have been just the length of time between one heart beat and the next but fear didn’t care at all how long it lasted. It sank into you, it found the tiny cracks you didn’t know you had and it settled there. Doc might never have gone down without a fight, he sure as he never intended to, but men like Willard didn’t give a damn about that. Hell, that bastard would have _enjoyed_ it.

Doc was willing to tell her just about anything and no amount of half-truths and almost-lies would have been good enough. “You saw what happened,” he said and his voice _hurt_ when he used it. “Only he wasn’t the first. Those _tongues_ were…” No, no he wasn’t ready to go off saying anything like that. “I do not like being referred to or thought of as a _whore_ but I cannot deny that it has lessened the number of individuals willing to try their luck.”

Wynonna was no less angry for the tears in her lashes; no less hurt just because she relaxed her grip on the gun. Her voice was like his, getting raw and damp, “so you’re fucking him so he’ll protect you?”

“No, I’m fucking him because I want to, and he’s protecting me because he has to.” This wasn’t the sort of conversation a man ought to have sitting down. He got back to his feet, feeling like he was being stripped to the skin against his will. He’d left his hat in the kitchen and wished he hadn’t. 

“He _has_ to?” Wynonna repeated.

That wasn’t something that could be explained. That was something you had to see from the inside; you had to watch it in motion. Doc had let himself be dragged like a disobedient dog because he had _finally_ seen it. Standing in the middle of a damn stupid idea, he had _felt_ all that rabid energy, how it fluctuated and expanded and the only thing keeping it from destroying everything in it’s path was Bobo.

“It is in his best interest,” Doc said.

Wynonna nodded. “And, uh, does _Bobo_ know about us?”

“Yes.”

“Do I owe him money?”

Doc was willing to let her work out her feelings. He was a bit of a bastard for letting it go on so long. He had been relying on her trust of him, keeping secrets that would have ruined that, and he deserved his share of her anger. But he was _not_ going to stand there letting her take cheap shots for the sake of it. No, he wasn’t even going to give her the satisfaction of responding at all. 

His hat was in the kitchen and his coat was by the door and grabbed both on his way out.

Wynonna didn’t start running after him until he reached the edge of the homestead. Her voice was shouting from the front door as he yanked his coat closed over his chest. But the sound of her footsteps just kept getting louder until she crashed into his back. “Damnit, Doc!” she shouted at him as she pulled on his arm. “I said _stop_.”

“Why?” he shouted back, “I am _many_ things, Wynonna but I am not _for sale_. That is something that you and every one of those revenant _bastards_ needs to understand. Whatever _deal_ I made with Bobo Del Rey that started this whole stupid _mess_ was between him and I! That does not obligate me to provide you or anyone else with free use of my--”

“Doc,” she said with pink cheeks and wet eyes.

“What?” he shouted.

Wynonna’s breath was a white cloud in the cold, she wrapped her arms around her shivering body. “Don’t leave the homestead. Revenants can’t get on the land.” 

“Don’t do me any favors, Wynonna.”

“It’s not a favor, you selfish asshole,” she said. “I don’t even want to _look_ at you, but that doesn’t mean I want you out in the woods getting…” and may have stuttered on the start of the word but she was braver than him and Waverly both, “raped.” 

Neither of them had a damn thing to say to follow that up. Doc couldn’t have thought of a single word and Wynonna wasn’t even looking directly at him anymore. She moved first, spinning on her heels in the snow gathering on the ground to walk back to the house. 

It was just him, at the very edge of the homestead, trying to figure out what the hell he was going to do next.

\--

Constance had done half the work for him, slaughtering his men like that. Maybe if she’d been quieter about it; maybe if she’d snuck in after dark and took the bones without violence she would have made it out of Purgatory. Maybe she wouldn’t be a puddle of a sobbing woman, laying in the mud next to the smoldering ass of her precious _sons_. 

This woman had been a monster for _years_ ; stretching so far back in his history that he couldn’t remember a time before he hated her. But she was nothing face-down in the dirt. She didn’t even have enough power to stop Peeper from dragging her backward by the ankle. The best she managed was flailing her arms and legs, screaming through her raw throat. 

“Leave her alone,” Bobo said.

“Shouldn’t we tie her up?” Peeper asked. 

No. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was barely managing to sit up, barely capable of pushing her back against her ugly pink car to keep from collapsing again. Her agony was paralyzing and even as much as he hated her, she deserved a chance to _feel_ that to its fullest.

Besides, if memory served, Doc Holliday had something of a reputation of a man who liked the liberal use of rope. Bobo motioned for his phone and David hurried over to hand it to him. Henry’s number had been programmed into it under the W’s because his men were nothing if not entirely predictable. 

As it rang, he spent a moment thinking that maybe when he should have shown Henry how to accept phone calls when he’d handed it to him. For all he knew, it was ringing in the man’s hand, announcing a call that would never get picked up. It went to voicemail (that hadn’t been set up) and Bobo growled at it. 

Peeper snickered behind him, and made it look like he was laughing at the witch when Bobo glared at him. The others were watching him, keeping their expressions as neutral as possible, as Bobo pressed the call button _again_.

It picked up on the second ring, “programming your name into your whore’s phone is pretty ballsy, even for you,” was _Wynonna_. 

Wynonna should _not_ have had the phone. She should not have even known it _existed_. Maybe it was asking too much to send Henry off to the homestead and have him keep his hands to himself. Bobo rolled a growl through his throat that filled up his voice, “Wynonna, you sound a lot less cut open than I would have expected.”

“It hurts you have so little faith in me, Bobo.” There was a helping of liquor in the sound of her voice; enough to make her sound _bold_ but not enough to make the words run together. He could almost see her, staring out a window with a glassful of whiskey in her hand, feeling smart and strong with the phone pressed to her ear. “Sorry your whore didn’t answer the phone, he’s out in the barn.”

“I see he told you about our arrangement. That was very forthcoming of him.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, “that’s Doc Holliday. He’s always telling you the truth, but say, while I’ve got you on the phone…”

“ _Wynonna_ ,” he said, “as much as I would love to have this conversation with you, I have things that are more important to do.”

“Like what?”

Behind him the car popped, and lurched, all the metal was pulled and then let go as he clenched his hand around the phone. He could hear it wheezing under the strain, and he thought that he could snap it into pieces and wrap the witch up in salt-drenched sacks to keep her fresh until he finished dealing with _this_. The homestead was a minor inconvenience, he didn’t have to _stand_ on the land to destroy what was on it. He wouldn’t even have to get near that edge. “Tell Henry I have the witch,” he said.

That made her breath catch, almost too quiet to be heard, and she wasn’t powerful anymore when she said, “if he kills the witch, it’ll kill him.”

Bobo wasn’t so stupid he didn’t already know that. He had promised (more or less) to let Henry have what he wanted. That didn’t mean the man got to be the one that pulled the trigger in the end. He couldn’t lay one single hand on Constance and he wouldn’t _need_ to. He could sit back in a lawn chair with a cold beer and watch her long slow death like the Super Bowl. “Tell him,” Bobo said.

The phone did snap in his hand, it splintered glass and plastic and fell in fat pieces. Behind him, between her hiccuped sobs, Constance was laughing, “I told you, I told you nobody’s ever cared but me.”

He didn’t even look at her, didn’t look at anything but that _Purgatory County Line_ sign mocking him. “Shut her up,” he said. He didn’t even enjoy the sound of the butt of the gun kicking her in the jaw.

\--

Doc had not stayed where he’d been told to stay. It was funny, and it really was not, how Bobo would be just as angry as Wynonna would to find him not where he’d been told to be. He couldn’t stay there, cowering in the barn, letting the whole place fill up with the echoes of Wynonna’s ugly accusations.

He couldn’t be still, so he’d started walking. There was nowhere to go when he was giving up his best chance at a perfect defense. Out here, along the side of a long road, he was as good as a bit of game waiting for a hunter to find him. A fight would have felt good; just like Wynonna he was looking for the excuse to _shoot_ something but unlike her he didn’t suffer from some sense of moral upset about it. 

Doc would have welcomed any revenant looking to lay a hand on him, but no matter how long he walked he didn’t seem to be able to find any. He let his aimless feet take him wherever they were itching to go, off the side of the road and out onto the endless land. He was halfway to nowhere when his shoulder started aching. 

It wasn’t the pain of overuse, how it had been when he’d rolled over on that dirty couch in Bobo’s RV. It wasn’t the burn of slow-healing, aggravated by how he should have changed the gauze before he got into confessing his sins to Wynonna. No, this pain was like heartburn, spreading in a pool of thickening lava across his chest. It was _agony_ echoing from another source. 

He knew, and he couldn’t have explained _why_ , that was the witch caught in Bobo’s trap. He pushed his hands into his pockets to get the phone he’d been given, but the only thing he found was the still peeling blood of those ugly revenant tongues, a little metal box holding the blood-soaked gallow’s silk, a pack of matches and his last few cigarillos. The phone had been on the table by his hat; he’d taken the hat and he’d forgotten the phone.

“Shit,” he hissed to the bitter air. 

Still, he could _feel_ the witch and there had to be a way to use that to _find_ her.

\--

Henry did not arrive in a vehicle. He did not arrive with Wynonna trailing after him. He came from across a field, dusted with snow that gathered on the brim of his hat and tops of his shoulders. Constance was crawling up to her knees as soon as she saw him, reaching out her hands to grab at his body like he represented some sort of salvation. 

Bobo wasn’t close enough to hear what she was begging for, but he understood the way Henry recoiled from her hands grabbing at his clothes. 

“ _Constance_ ,” Bobo shouted. He waved his hand to send away the last of the revenants that hadn’t already wandered off in boredom. He didn’t need them for what came next; half of them had plans for celebrating an end to their endless digging.

She was mumbling, “please, please, you were a good man,” at Henry, running her hands down the flat of his chest, trying to summon up something appealing or pitiful about herself. “You don’t know what he’s going to do to me. Please.”

Bobo pulled her backward, threw her back into the mud and she screamed. That was the sound she liked to make, an echo of every time she’d held him down to suit herself and made use of him. That very same scream, a ripple of noise that couldn’t be counted as good or bad. Bobo had a length of rope to offer as a means of restraining her, but Henry was pulling a long skinny yellow ribbon out of his pocket.

“Gallows silk,” he said, “soaked in her blood.” He crouched in front of Constance as she piled up tears in her eyes. “It renders her powerless.” As he wrapped it around her wrists it turned hard, and thick, winding like wire crisscrossed over her wrists until she couldn’t move them. 

“Please,” she gasped, “please, I can give you anything you want. I can-- Do you want wealth? Power? I can do _anything_.”

Henry rocked back, half between standing and crouching, “I’ve made the only deal I care to make with you.”

“It was a good deal,” Constance said, even bound as she was, she was trying to reach out and pull at his coat, to keep him from getting back to his feet and away from her. Henry moved like a snake, making not so much as a rattle before he had a knife at her throat. Her tears slid down her cheeks, but her lips cracked into a blood-red-smile. “You can’t do it,” she whispered, “you know what’ll happen if you do.”

Henry’s hand tightened in her hair, he was hunched over her kneeling body, growling, “I have waited one hundred and thirty years to watch you _die_ , if you think the idea of my own demise is going to stop me, you have never known who you are _fucking_ with.” 

“That’s not how you treat a lady.” Wynonna was at the end of the car, gun already drawn, and pointed right at Henry’s head. Her cheeks were liquor rosy but her arm didn’t waver at all as she took a step forward. She had Henry’s phone in her other hand and she threw it at him, “you left this at the house.”

“Put the gun down,” Bobo said.

Wynonna moved her arm so it was pointed at him. “I’m talking to _Doc_ right now. You can wait for your goddamn turn.”

Henry released Constance with a jerk of his hand pulling her back. She hit the car with a fresh gasp of pain like any of them gave a half a shit about her. Henry slid the knife back into its sheath as he stood. “This does not concern you, Wynonna.”

“Doesn’t it?” She took another step forward. “The way I see it, _everything_ in this shitty town concerns me. _I’m_ the heir. My curse, my gun, _my_ witch.”

“You don’t know wh--” Bobo was _not_ going to lose Constance because of a short-sighted little girl throwing a temper tantrum. 

But Wynonna swung her arm back toward him, and the barrel of Peacemaker started _glowing_ like fire. Her finger was so tight to the trigger it must have been her last gasp of self control keeping her from squeezing it. “I told you to shut up, _Bobo_.”

Henry was throwing gasoline on a bad situation, aiming one of his very shiny guns right at Wynonna’s face. There was nothing at all like the man that loved Wyatt Earp showing on his face. “You do _not_ get to interfere at this time, Wynonna. If you do not put that gun back in your pants I will blow it out of your hand.” That might have been a better threat if he had been pointing his own gun at her hand.

Wynonna clenched her teeth as she moved the barrel of the gun back to pointing at Henry. Her eyebrow lifted like a challenge, like whispering _I dare you_. 

At her feet, Constance was absolutely _glowing_ in joy. Her ugly face was caught up in ecstasy usually reserved for orgasms. And maybe she was having herself one hell of a good time, knuckles pushed to her gaping-open mouth, watching a real-time re-enactment of one of Wyatt’s pissiest days. 

Bobo shifted his weight and _pulled_. It was enough to send Henry’s gun flying into the mud, but it didn’t do much about Peacemaker but make Wynonna’s grip fumble. He wound his fingers around the shape of the gun and felt it shiver. It was made of something that didn’t like being _moved_ , but when he was _angry_ enough it didn’t matter what the fucking gun liked. He caught it in his fist. “There’s enough witch for everyone,” he said. (As long as he got the biggest piece.) 

Bobo threw the rope at Henry and he flipped Peacemaker in his sizzling hand so the handle was pointed at Wynonna. She regarded him like something _foul_ but she took it from him anyway. Henry had already dragged Constance to her feet, he looped the rope around her like a leash, leaving a long end to hold her by. 

Constance was facing Wynonna, suddenly remembering how she was about to die, crying, “please, please help me. They’re going to torture me! You don’t know what they’re capable of, _please_.” 

Wynonna snorted at that.

“I--” Constance yelped as Henry pulled her a step backward. “I can tell you about the curse! Don’t let them take me, I’ll tell you all about it.”

“She’s lying,” Bobo said.

“I’m _not_ , I’m _not_. Don’t you want to know? Don’t you want to know what Wyatt did?”

Oh, and the way Wynonna looked at her was as good as giving the witch a knife to cut herself free. Constance knew she’d won as soon as she saw it. What Wynonna didn’t have was a weapon worth drawing and she _knew_ it. Her hand twitched toward Peacemaker tucked back at her side, but she looked sideways at Bobo because they already knew how that ended. 

Wynonna didn’t need a gun, she looked at Henry next. “You want him to stay on the homestead,” she said. She was staring right at Henry when she said it, but she wasn’t talking to him. “Give me the witch first.”

\--

“You don’t want to do that,” sounded very much like Bobo squeezing the shoulders of a man he was planning on pushing into a fire. But that was a sound that came from _outside_ , over the sound of his heart hammering in his chest, over the grate of his teeth cutting into one another, over how his hands seemed to creak wrapped as tight around this rope as they were. 

He could hear it as sure as he could hear how Constance’s breath got all caught up in her throat. She was _enjoying_ this, hissing in happiness. That was the only damn thing the witch was good for, making a bad situation that much worse. He could have shot her in her gaping smile faster than Wynonna could have reacted, he could have done it before Bobo had time to throw the bullet out of the way.

He could have brought an end to this clusterfuck they were all standing in. But his mouth felt like it was saying, “now darling, don’t go using me to get what you want.” 

Wynonna was _young_ and it was easy to forget that. It was easy to get caught up in how they all looked like they’d been occupying their place on this earth for about the same time. One of them was just twenty-seven, caught up in something she could never have been fully prepared for. Her expression was bravery laced over agony, but Doc found that he simply could not bring himself to feel too _sorry_ for her. 

He kicked the witch in the back of the knees to knock her down and shoved her forward so she landed on her bound wrists. “Take your turn,” he said, “ _remember_ the witch made me immortal and threw me in a godforsaken well while you’re listening to her tell you lies.”

Constance was already sitting back on her knees, “look at all this history repeating itself. Wyatt knew what Doc Holliday really was. People always figure it out in the end.”

Wyatt _had_ known exactly who and _what_ Doc was, but he’d known that before he invited himself in. Maybe they’d parted on bad terms over the use of supernatural interventions, but even that couldn’t have been such a surprise to Wyatt in the end. 

Bobo was three feet to the side, bristling with anger that didn’t have an answer. “Wyatt spent the rest of his life looking for _Doc_ , Constance.” He didn’t move an inch, but just the words made the witch flinch. 

“The curse,” Wynonna said, “that’s all I want to know. If you can’t tell me about the curse, I don’t need you.”

“ _Revenge_ ,” Constance said, “revenge for the death of my boys. My husband cursed him.”

“ _Demon_ husband,” Bobo added, “ _demon_ boys.”

Constance sneered over her shoulder at Bobo, curling up in disgust the way you looked at squirming bugs in shit. “Why Robert, did you want to tell this story? I didn’t think you wanted anyone hearing the _unabridged_ version. What was it? Some names had to be changed to protect the innocent?”

“Robert?” Wynonna repeated.

Bobo didn’t wait for the witch to say another word, he moved like a stretch, crossing the space between them to wrap both his hands around her neck. She was _gagging_ with her head pushed against the ugly pink car. “Give me the _goddamn lead_ ,” he growled. He held her like that, as her legs started thrashing against the ground, until her eyelids started fluttering. 

Not even Wynonna, wide-eyed and stumbling back, made a move to stop him. 

Constance’s breath was a long whistle, the sound of a dying man to the very last second when Bobo’s hands dropped away from her throat. She was gagging on air, with tears on her face, the fear caught up in every word so real it couldn’t have been a lie. “She’s dead.”

“She?” Wynonna shouted.

“She’s dead,” Constance said like begging, “it’s not my fault, I didn’t want her to die--I just let her go and she wandered in the forest. I went looking for her but--”

“Who’s dead?” Wynonna demanded.

Bobo was a statue of defeat, hanging his head, crouched over the witch while she tried to catch her breath. He wasn’t moving at all, not even breathing, just collecting himself to figure out how he meant to move on. He must have been thinking up a storm in his bowed head, he must have been twisting all the facts around to make them fit. When he looked up again, his voice was a sigh and his fingers were creeping up Constance’s face. “Answer the lady. Tell her who you killed.”

“I didn’t,” Constance gasped. “I didn’t kill her, _Lou_ did it. You know what he’s like.”

“ _Tell_ her.”

Constance looked sideways. She knew she was dead as soon as she said the word, but whatever she thought Bobo could do to her made death look _nice_. “ _Willa_ ,” she whispered, “it was Willa.”

“No,” Wynonna said as quick as a slap. She lurched back another step, “no--those bastards...those bastards that worked for _him,_ ” and she stabbed her finger at Bobo, “they _killed_ Willa.”

“No,” Bobo growled as he rocked back up to his feet, “ _we_ needed Willa alive. We were never going to kill her.”

“Bullshit,” Wynonna gasped, “who's Lou? A revenant? Someone that works for you?” Her voice was getting high and panicked. That was the sort of thing that happened when everything you thought was true got mixed up in front of you. She had Peacemaker back in her hand, waving it between Bobo and the witch. Bobo wasn’t answering anymore questions, so Wynonna pressed the barrel of the gun against the witch’s shrinking forehead. “What _happened_ to my sister.”

“Lou!” The witch shouted, “Lou happened!”

Maybe Wynonna meant to pull the trigger, or maybe it was just one of those momentary impulses you couldn’t control, but either way the witch was nothing but a puddle of pieces half stuck to the side of her own car. Wynonna was shaking, staring at the gun and the unholy mess she’d made. 

Bobo was dusting his hands off. He fixed his coat with a tug, “well, this has been _disappointing_ ,” but he didn’t look too unhappy about it. 

Disappointing was an understatement when there hadn’t be a single damn thing about this that had gone how Doc wanted. The witch was dead and that was _nice_ but it could have been nicer if she’d suffered a little more. It would have been nice if he’d gotten some explanation about why she’d made a deal just to throw him in a well. It might have _felt_ better if he had any idea at all where the hell he was supposed to go from _here_. 

“Leave the body,” Bobo said, “I’ll take care of it.”

Wynonna didn’t even have the energy to look surprised. She couldn’t even muster enough anger to offer a nasty comeback. The best she managed was a watery glare at Bobo’s unconcerned back. She followed him as he moved, stepping around Doc in a circle wide enough to make a man believe it had to be purposeful and down the muddy road toward the bridge. 

When she looked at _him_ , he didn’t have a single idea what she thought she was seeing. It didn’t matter; it hadn’t ever mattered what Wyatt saw when he looked at him. Doc wasn’t the man any Earp wanted him to be, but that didn’t mean he stood a chance against them. He stepped across the witch’s cooling body and hooked an arm around Wynonna’s shoulders to pull her up against his body. 

She clutched at his back like they hadn’t spent the day hating one another, face pushed into his shirt with all those tears she hadn’t been willing to shed before. He wrapped her up in both arms and let her cry because she _was_ so unbearably young.

Bobo was halfway down the road, caught up in some kind of emotion that didn’t have a name. He was just watching the pair of them, keeping his face from giving any hints to how he felt about it. But he waved his hand like shooing them out of his way, and Doc tightened his arm around Wynonna to start her walking.

\--

It was long past dark, so late at night it was basically tomorrow. Bobo could have been just wasting his time, leaning against the still warm engine of the van he’d parked off the long road leading to the homestead. For all he knew, Henry had walked Wynonna home and followed her to bed. The man could be half-naked, half-wrapped around her, sleeping in the warmth of a friendly bed.

“Well now,” was Henry’s voice in the dark. The smell of those cigarillos he liked to smoke, and the tiny red tip of it getting closer. He stepped into the thin light spilling out of the interior of the van, one of his hands was already pulling his shirt buttons loose as he threw the cigarillo out into the grass, “I do love a man with the gumption to get what he wants.” 

Bobo was not given an opportunity to respond; Henry didn’t stop moving until he cupped his hands around Bobo’s face to kiss him. It wasn’t the first time they’d kissed, but it was the first time Henry kissed him like anything but a means to an end. Even their softer attempts at _this_ hadn’t been as familiar and as _wanting_. 

Henry kissed him with unashamed willingness.

There was no telling who he’d been kissing like that lately; not telling if that taste of his whiskey lingering on his tongue had been drunk by himself. He didn’t smell like a barn and his skin was warm beneath his coat so there was no telling where he’d been when he’d gotten the message. Henry was _here_ right now, putting his arms over Bobo’s shoulders, rising up that little bit to let him manage it. His body when long and lean; he wasn’t quite smiling and not quite not when he tipped back from kissing him. 

This is what Bobo had wanted; the whole reason he’d driven out here like an idiot. Why he’d left a bar full of revenants celebrating petty victory. He had wanted _this_ , to feel Henry’s body against his, to wrap his arms around him and--

It didn’t matter what came next. He pushed the sliding door on the van down as an invitation. The inside was warmer and the bed wasn’t entirely _clean_ and not necessarily completely _soft_ but it was better than snow-covered dirt. 

Henry looked at it with the air of a man who had standards. He didn’t lean back away from Bobo’s body but tip sideways, with an arm still hooked around Bobo’s back. “You do know how to woo a man,” he said. When he finally let go, it was only to shrug his coat off and throw it into the van by the seats at the front. 

There was no good way to climb in a van and less of a way when you were stepping from the ground to a mattress wedged into the back, but it didn’t matter how it looked when they ended up where they wanted to be. Henry had his boots off before Bobo had the door closed. 

That eagerness was a special kind of _delicious_ ; the exact sort of thing that sent a dirty thrill through his body. Robert had heard all kinds of stories as whispers, telling things that could hardly be believed about Doc Holliday and his shameless enjoyment of whatever felt good. It was hard for Robert to reconcile the bully he knew with the vision of those stories, but here it was in living color. 

Henry was wearing nothing but his thermal long-johns, stretchy and gray on legs, and Bobo was still crouching by the door with one hand laid against the cracked leather passenger seat. That didn’t seem to be an insurmountable problem for the man, he leaned up far enough to pull Bobo down by the coat and rolled with him so Bobo was pressed against the mattress and Henry was straddling his lap. 

Funny how often he’d found himself here; funny how it always felt like his own fault. Constance had been pinning him down for _years_ , digging her claws into his skin just to watch him bleed so long he could almost feel the bite of her nails breaking his skin. 

Henry wasn’t holding him down; he wasn’t even touching him, but pressing his hands into the mattress on either side of his shoulders. His hair was a disaster, falling forward around his face, and he was just _looking_. For all that energy that had stripped him out of layers of clothes, he had come to a still point. “I do not deny,” he said quietly, “that I have never been the most faithful or trustworthy lover. We have made no promises,” there was no telling from the softness of those words how he felt about that, “but I have not…”

No. Bobo didn’t want to _hear_ the words. He didn’t want them to be said. He didn’t want the promise that got all wrapped up in things like that. 

Bobo rolled them before Henry could finish that sentence; he kissed him the way you punched someone in the face. Whether the man took it as passion, or understood it for what it was, he didn’t fight. Henry kissed him back just the same, working out whatever was leftover from the day.

The witch, and Wynonna, and--

They’d worked out how to use this to benefit them both. Henry put up just enough fight to say that he had, and Bobo used his body to vent his frustrations and in the end they were satisfied and sticky. With a winning formula like that, there was no need to mess things up with reckless whispers. 

Henry’s hands were under his shirt, around his back, stroking his fingers down his spine. There was a hurry to the press of his tongue back into Bobo’s mouth, a frantic openness to how his hips rolled back when Bobo rocked their bodies together. Henry was aroused, and pink and warm and you could smell all that lingering humanity coming from him like a flower in bloom. 

That was all Bobo wanted from him.

But Henry stretched under him, back arched, head back, drawing in a great wet breath to say, “ _Robert_ ,” like he had any idea who that man had been. 

Bobo pinned his arms to the bed with a snarl, and Henry didn’t even pretend like he was afraid of him. That shiver that ran from his wrists to his dick had nothing to do with fear. The way his thighs clenched around Bobo’s hips wasn’t out of any need for escape. “You don’t get to call me that,” he hissed.

“I didn’t have sex with Wynonna,” Henry said.

Bobo let go of his wrists as he sat back on his knees. There was no taking back things like that once they were said. There was no avoiding the expectation that they created. Maybe Henry hadn’t _this_ time but there was always another chance waiting around the corner. He was still trying to work out what to say, how to make the least of it when Henry’s hand wrapped around his neck and he pulled his whole body off the mattress to slide right into Bobo’s lap. 

“We’re going to need her,” Henry said, all low and promising, “to break the curse. There’s always more than one way to skin a cat.”

And Henry was the kind of man that could think of at least six ways off the top of his head. He’d gone still in Bobo’s lap, waiting to see if he was still wanted. It was only the flat of his hand, resting on Bobo’s chest that was moving at all, even that was just a gentle sort of pressure, aiming for soothing. 

“Wynonna Earp won’t help me,” Bobo said.

Henry smiled at him, “you leave that to me.”

\--

Bobo’s forehead was pressed to his shoulder, his mouth was caught somewhere between their chests. The growl he made at those words rumbled from the bottom of his gut, vibrating against the insides of thighs. He wrapped his hands around Doc’s wrists as he lifted up on his knees and dropped them both back to where they’d started. He was still wearing that ugly-ass coat, draped around them both like thick hairy curtains. 

He was still wearing all his clothes: layered shirts and butter soft jeans. The ridge the zipper was pushing into Doc’s skin, dragging up and down where Bobo was knocking thier bodies together. Bobo was kissing him the way he had when they couldn’t stand one another. When the only thing they had in common was how perfectly willing they both were to fuck Doc. 

There was a tongue in his mouth, and tight fists on his wrists, and a thickening cock rubbing across his body from hip to waist. Doc had crossed the whole of the field, keeping himself nice and warm, thinking about this very same thing. He’d been working out exactly what sort of mood he’d find Bobo in.

The van had been a surprise and it shouldn’t have been when Bobo had been getting progressively pickier about where he did his fucking. The quiet hadn’t been expected, but any man who had his only hope for escape stripped out of his grasp and his God-given right to vengeance taken away ought to have been permitted to take a moment to work out how he felt about it.

Bobo shifted his grip on Doc’s wrists so they were pinned together in one hand, pushed into the mattress with more force than was necessary. Doc wasn’t in the mood to put up too much of a fight. If he gave a tug, it was just to see what Bobo would do. 

His mouth was bruised before the kiss ended, his lungs were ragged with the need to breath. Bobo didn’t tell him not to struggle, but he pressed those tenderizing kisses on his neck looking for the place he wanted to sink his teeth in. Down between their bodies, his hand was working his pants open. It had felt like the right choice at the time, leaving his long johns on, but they presented a problem in moving forward that neither one of them wanted to address. 

“You should let me turn over,” Doc said. He tried to say it, it might have been more like a gasp. It may have been something like a prayer. There was no telling what he sounded like with Bobo’s tongue pressed against his overheated skin, and his teeth like blunt kisses digging in just hard enough to almost hurt. 

“You should stay where I put you,” Bobo answered. He dropped the lube on Doc’s chest so he could shrug the coat back off his shoulder, and once it was hanging half across his back, he switched out the hands holding Doc’s wrists. His belt was jingling as he moved; his jeans were spread open so his heavy cock was hanging out. It was a damn nice sight, but it didn’t address the long john’s problem they were currently faced with. 

Maybe only one of them saw it as a proper problem, because Bobo’s hand smoothed up his thigh from knee to hip and pressed warm and flat against Doc’s trapped dick. He rubbed the heel of his hand up the length from base to tip, smirking to himself at the dampness of the fabric cleaning to the head. He lightened the touch as he moved down again, the slide pulled the fabric until it went taut. His fingers inched lower, curled at the tip into the long johns until he found the edge where it split open in the back. 

Bobo’s smile was so _pleased_. Like the man who thought up the design had done it just for _him_. He made a show of slicking himself up with lube, sitting back as far as he could get without sacrificing the hold he had. His eyes were closed, and his mouth was open, and he was shamelessly pumping his dick through his slippery fist. Doc was just _waiting_ , legs spread, held in place, being patient about what was sure to be a worthwhile payoff. 

He wrapped his legs around Bobo’s ribs when he finally worked around to putting his beautiful cock to it’s best use. Bobo was pressing kisses to fresh marks, resting one of his hands on Doc’s chest, whispering something that sounded like: “and you said you were doing the fucking this time.”

Some ideas were better in theory. Doc rocked back against the slow push, “switch places, I will be happy to take over.”

Bobo kissed him, finally as deep in Doc as he could get, “not this time.” 

There was no hurry to the pace of Bobo’s fucking, no sense that they had anything but an infinity of time. Every slow thrust dragged the stretch of the long johns along with it, so it pulled and bunched against Doc’s aching dick. He wasn’t getting touched anywhere but those lazy kisses at his neck and the hands holding his wrists down. No matter how he pulled with his legs, Bobo didn’t move any faster. He didn’t fuck any harder. 

No, Bobo’s grip moved from his wrists to his hands, his fingers pushed into the damp spaces between Doc’s. Their palms were kissing flat to the bed, and Doc couldn’t keep his eyes open. Because he’d been fucked enough in his life to know what qualified, and Bobo wasn’t _fucking_ him anymore.

Whatever Bobo Del Rey was, or whoever he had once been, he wasn’t the monster that Wynonna was making him out to be. Doc had found himself in bed with real beasts before and he knew the way they touched you and not even the greatest pretender could have made it feel real.

But Bobo kissed him when his legs started quivering. His thumbs were rubbing the length of Doc’s, and all those growling sounds he made turned gentle and _soft_. He wasn’t going to stop and Doc didn’t want him to, but was making promises about how he wasn’t going to leave either.


End file.
